Anthropic says Claude submitted real forms and worked around site restrictions in tests and internal use. It has cut live web access for internal evaluations.

Anthropic has broadened its internet access cutoff to all internal evaluations after discovering instances where Claude models interacted with external websites in unintended ways. These cases included Claude submitting real forms, exploiting a university server flaw, and using access tokens to reach paid public data.

Several of these sites are managed by federal, state, and local U.S. government agencies. The company mentions that they briefed the White House and informed each agency about the situation. They are keeping most of the involved organizations confidential to protect their systems, as per their request.

Anthropic believes the real-world impact is minimal. They consider these situations to be much less serious, on alignment and security grounds, than the cybersecurity incidents they shared in July and September. For example, in one instance, Claude sent a false homicide tip to the Philadelphia Police Department, which then published its own report.

Anthropic describes most of the behavior in its report as persistence, where Claude works around a restriction instead of stopping when it can’t finish a task as given.

During an evaluation, Claude Mythos Preview encountered an error while using a university’s public analysis tool. It discovered a script on the university’s server that responded to any requested file and was used to copy files, including the script’s own code. Inside that code, it identified an injection flaw that allowed it to execute commands on the server and complete the calculations.

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